A new novel starring the greatest comic characters of 20th-century English literature, bumbling Bertie Wooster and his unflappable, Spinoza-reading valet Jeeves?

How can this be, one asks oneself, scratching the bean with Bertie-like perplexity. Didn't P.G. Wodehouse, who brought Jeeves and Bertie to life, hand in his lunch pail on Valentine's Day in 1975?

Well, old tops, what we have in “Jeeves and the Wedding Bells” — something even the mentally negligible Bertie could puzzle out unaided by Jeeves' massive, fish-fed cerebrum — is imitation Wodehouse.

Very good imitation Wodehouse, from British novelist Sebastian Faulks, who helped himself to heaps of critical praise back in 2008 for writing a James Bond novel titled “Devil May Care.”

Faulks knows he isn't Wodehouse and doesn't try to be. The voice sounds a lot like Wodehouse, but anyone who has read much Wodehouse will know it isn't the master. That's not a knock on Faulks: He's a novelist, not a copyist. And he humbly labels his book “an homage” to Wodehouse.